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When reviewing The Fenceless Field, a collection of Michael Fordham's papers, for this Journal recently (vol.9, 1995, 301-306), Richard Carvalho complained at the way Jungians are offered Jungian books to review, Middle-Groupers middle-groups books, Kleinians Kleinian books, and so on. He felt this perpetuated the divisions between us, keeping us all ‘fenced’ inside our fields.
And I, another Jungian, reviewing Michael Fordham's memoir, tend to agree, and to wonder how many of the younger analysts and psychotherapists from other schools will have heard of Fordham. They will probably not know his paper, given at the 1959 Symposium on Countertransference held by the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society. The other speakers were Paula Heimann, Margaret Little, Ruth Strauss and D W Winnicott, who, despite coming from different schools, had much in common in their thinking about the analytic attitude.
Dr Michael Fordham died in April 1995. A figure of immense importance to British Jungians, he had been instrumental in the establishment of the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in London as a training body for both Adult and Child analysts. He had co-edited (with Gerhardt Adler and Herbert Read) the English translation of Jung's Collected Works and had been the founding editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. He was an innovative theoretician, using Kleinian ideas to open out and challenge Jung's views of the psyche in childhood, creating an entirely original theory of the process of the development of the self. Jung's theory of individuation could be shown to apply right from the beginning of life, not just in the second half of adulthood, as Jung himself had suggested.
The Making of an Analyst is an autobiographical memoir describing both the public and private sides of a richly-led life. Fordham came from a minor branch of a family of East Anglian land-owning gentry. The sense of Fordhams being special seems to have stayed with him all his life